


Works No Longer In Progress 2014

by Kurukami



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Fringe, Once Upon a Time (TV), Pacific Rim (2013), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: AU, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Ficlet Collection, For Science!, Gen, Loki is crazy, but still right, unexpected consequences, walter is crazy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-31
Updated: 2014-12-31
Packaged: 2018-03-04 13:08:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3069200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kurukami/pseuds/Kurukami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a multitude of universes, there are many stories - some that begin and finish well-conceived, others that meander, and a few that begin or end without satisfaction or any sense of closure.  These ficlets are, most likely, the latter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Open A Door and Climb Through

**Author's Note:**

> Following in copperbadge's footsteps, I decided to clear out a bunch of fics that I haven't had the chance or interest to properly pursue as the year clears out. A lot of it started up with inspiring direction and then just... kind of stalled. Most if not all are from Marvel movies fandom. Enjoy!

“This will destroy you.” She studies Loki carefully, watching his reaction. “You _must_ suspect that.”

“Of course I do.” The hint of a smirk tugs at one corner of his mouth.

“Then… why?” Around them, technicians swarm in last-minute preparation, setting things in motion to generate a new (and hopefully less catastrophically destructive) portal. It’s obvious, though, that even with all the frenetic activity the two of them are the focus of everyone’s attention. Fury, even absent, must be watching these moments with ferocious zeal. 

“Oh, any number of reasons,” he replies airily, as though he doesn’t have a care in the world about going to his almost-certain death. “I’m sure Thor would gamely offer up some ill-conceived rationale about how he’d sworn to defend and guard this world, even unto his death as a heroic martyr.”

“You’re not Thor.” She evocatively raises one eyebrow. 

“My, your adept observations continue to shock me into silent awe.”

She snorts. “All evidence to the contrary. And you still haven’t answered my question.”

Loki slants her a narrow look, mild with equal parts annoyance and amusement. She tilts her head to one side, waiting him out. Finally… “You always have been able to read me rather too well, I see.”

“Mmmm,” she says, noncommittally.

He takes a deep breath, lets it slowly trickle out. “I never have told anyone, here or elsewhere, the things I saw as I fell. Where I landed. The horrors I witnessed, the tortures I endured, the byzantine deceptions and manipulations I had to engage in just to have a single _chance_ at…” He trails off. “The things I have done were, are, terrible. I do not deny that. But those acts were performed for the purpose of frustrating the ambitions of a singular opponent.”

“Who?”

He silently gestures towards where the portal will form.

“His _name_ , Loki. What is he called? We might be able to research—”

Loki begins to laugh, quietly at first, then more uncontrollably, giggles and peals of jagged mirth tumbling ever more desperately from his mouth like a jökulhaup breaking free of a shattered glacial dam. Long seconds pass, until the only sound is his ragged breathing. Then: “I pray that you will never need to learn his name. There is no research you can do, not here. Nothing useful, nothing that I have not already provided to your scientists and sages. And to speak his name draws his attention.”

Her lips thin, and she carefully, oh so casually, looks away towards where the dimensional tear will open. “I suppose there’s little more to say, then.”

Loki is quiet for a long moment. “There’s substantially more. We merely lack for time. But…”

“Hmmm?” 

“Look to Londinium, in a score of moons. There will be chaos in a far vaster order, and chaos…” He pauses. “Chaos can be a ladder, that may allow for great change.”

She gives him a dubious look, then hands him the case as energy surges around them, the substance of the air peels back like the petals of a flower, and the heat of the room seems to fall helplessly away. “Good luck, Loki.”

“Goodbye, Agent Romanov. I hope we shall meet again.” He takes a step forward, then speaks over his shoulder from the portal's threshold. “Under better circumstances.”

Her eyes narrow, and she cocks her head at him as he steps forward, away… and is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This started with the sentence "This will destroy you; you know that" and blossomed out from there. It never really took root within a larger story, though, and so remains an orphaned ficlet. It's meant to take place in the aftermath of The Avengers, wherein somehow (maybe Loki accepts Thor's counsel to try to stop the ongoing Chitauri invasion?) Loki ends up tenuously allied with the Avengers against Thanos's machinations.
> 
> Loki's reference at the end to Londinium is meant to parallel the events that arise in Thor: The Dark World.


	2. Crossing the Rubicon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

>   
>  _“Of course there's a problem opening a hole to another reality.  
>  In theory, that would also allow things from there to pass over here, which could be dangerous.”_
> 
> Walter Bishop, “There’s More Than One Of Everything”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one got off the ground because I saw the Fringe episode "There's More Than One of Everything" shortly after I watched Pacific Rim. Walter realizes, years after he rescued the alternate Peter, that his work in creating a bridge to the Other Side is what allowed the Kaiju and their Masters to follow back to earth and create a rift here. Sadly, I wasn't able to turn it into something with a coherent plot that went beyond "this is the introduction of how Peter Bishop and Olivia Dunham ended up fighting the Kaiju together", and it kind of spiralled out into a MUCH bigger fic idea than I had time to write.
> 
> Maybe I'll go back to it at some point, though.
> 
> AU notes: For purposes of this crossover,  
> consider all effective Fringe-dates to be moderately altered.  
> Peter Bishop was born in 1985, rather than 1978;  
> Peter in the prime-universe died in 1995 (at age 10), rather than 1985.

The winter of 1995 was bitterly cold in the Sierra Nevadas. Did you know that?

In truth, it was cold throughout much of California that season. But on the southern coast of Lake Tahoe, from McKinney Bay past Emerald Bay and practically all the way to the Nevada shoreline, ice locked the waters of the lake tight for at least one day in late December. There are those who say it didn’t happen, that it was a freakish and far more localized occurrence, that the lake is far too large a body of water to ever truly freeze. 

They are wrong. 

I know this for a fact, because I was the reason it froze.

It was necessary, you see. It was the only way to draw the energy needed to maintain the portal, after the initial push of energy to generate it. The gasoline-powered generator I brought with me was never going to be enough, of course; not for what I intended. It only needed to be enough to jump-start the apparatus into a sustainable plateau. The Langmuir process, after all, allows for the entropic gathering of heat energy from a sufficiently large liquid base by trailing filaments of highly thermoconductive material into the reservoir, then converting the harvested heat-energy into electricity rather like some pseudo-alchemical scyphozoan and --

\-- well, the details don’t matter. What _matters_ is that it was the only way to save Peter. The only way to keep him alive. I know, he’s not mine, not truly, but he _is,_ in every way that matters, he is mine, and he was very sick, and there I was, not seeing the cure that was right in front of my face, I got it right but didn’t see it, and if I hadn’t been watching I would have lost him all over again and I couldn’t bear to have that happen and…

My point… what was my point… my point is, the lake freezing was merely a side effect. Lake Tahoe was the only body of water large enough to generate the necessary energy via the Langmuir process and isolated enough that doing so wouldn’t endanger the lives and welfare of many innocent people. I’ve read Vonnegut, after all. I know Oppenheimer’s infamous quote all too well.

Despite what you may think of me, I’m not some villainous mad scientist. I merely did what I had to do.

Or at least… so I believed then.

_\-- PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW SUBJECT: WALTER BISHOP_  
\-- TRIAL MEDICATION: HALDOL (5 Mg), SECONAL (100 Mg), LORAZEPAM (2 Mg)  
\-- PESCADERO STATE PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTION, 22 APR 2002. 

* * *

1.

It’s seven minutes past twelve on a Thursday, and Peter Bishop is busy hustling his classmates at Texas Hold’em on a lunch break far too short to properly clean the snobby bastards out, when the earthquake hits.

He knows what it is in the first instant: the liquid, uneven twisting of the linoleum tiles rolling underfoot even as the long rumble begins to build, shaking the light fixtures overhead and rattling the windows in their panes. He’s scrambling for the shelter of the teacher’s sturdy, antique wooden desk even as the others begin to shout. He doesn’t even know why, just that he needs shelter in an instinctive panicky reflex that makes him think of snow in the air and slippery ice underfoot for no reason he can name.

“Oh my God, is that—”

“—shit, get away from the—”

“—son of a bitch motherfu—”

“Get under some cover!” he shouts at them, and his voice cracks – goddamn adolescence and goddamn being barely sixteen – even as they stampede for the doorframe like lemmings. Fluorescent tubes rattle and clatter off their ceiling brackets, a windowpane shatters with a surprisingly muted noise, the chairs and desks are skittering across the floor like ants running from a giant boot, and the noise builds and builds and builds and he thinks the room might be about to come down around them and Peter braces himself desperately against the shelter of the desk and he’s never been one for praying but all of a sudden he sure as hell feels like trying if he just manages to live through the next few—

—and then it’s gone, fading, like some goddamned enormous freight train that’d been rolling up forever and finally, finally went past. In the distance he can hear the echoes of that rumbling still spilling across the San Francisco hills, slowly being eclipsed by a growing chorus of car alarms.

His fingers don’t want to let go of the desk, and he actually has to stop a second and focus before they’ll unclench from the old, comfortingly worn wood. He takes one breath, then another, and then carefully uncoils himself from under the desk and peers out. 

“Hey,” Peter tries, and the word shudders unevenly from his mouth. He clears his throat, tries again. “Hey, anyone hurt?”

“Um… no?” That’s Terry.

“No, I’m OK.” Phil.

“I think I got scratched a little by glass, but otherwise no.” Martin.

“Son of a bitch, I had two queens – but no, Bishop, I’m fine, thanks for fucking asking.”

Peter smiles crookedly at the last – trust Jack Pierrot to gripe about his own minor misfortunes even at a time like this – but can’t resist needling him a little all the same as he eyes the four of them jammed unevenly in the doorframe. “Just as well. My ace-king of spades probably would’ve cleaned you out.”

Jack coughs into one hand as he untangles himself from the others, giving Peter a long stare, then spits to one side on the now-filthy floor. “That for your ace-king, you bastard.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. You and your lousy card-luck are welcome at my table any time.” He grins up at the others as he slowly emerges from the desk’s shelter. “Come on. We’d better get the hell out to the emergency gather spot before they send some professor to look for us and we all end up screwed.”

Through the window he can see there’s smoke rising from somewhere over by Golden Gate Park, but, eh, whatever. Emergency services will no doubt handle whatever happened with the quake soon enough. He steps over to the cards still lying scattered on the floor – queen of spades, eight of spades, seven of hearts, six of clubs – and quickly squares them back into the deck. Too damn bad on the timing of the quake, really; once the burn card had gone in the discard pile he knows full well the three of spades underneath it would’ve sucked Jack right in for the river and everything he’s got in his wallet.

Next time, maybe.

: : : : : :

Except there isn’t a next time. Not for a long, long time to come.

* * *

2\. 

Walter Bishop could have studied at, and eventually become the chair of biochemistry at, any university in the country. Arguably, in the world. He was simply that brilliant and driven – anyone who knew him could see as much. In the end, though, he chose Stanford (first in the country in biology, second in biochemistry, biophysics, and structural biology) over Harvard (second in the country in biology, first in biochemistry and so forth) at least partially because of the climate. There was something to be said, after all, for winters that didn’t involve icy sidewalks, unpredictable blizzards, and enough salt on the roads to make a car rust out five years before its time. So despite having been born in the fall of 1951 in Cambridge, Massachusetts (home of the prestigious Harvard University) Walter decided that Stanford (right next door to sunny Palo Alto, California) was certainly an acceptable alternative.

In another life, another universe, things might have turned out differently.

* * *

(fic segments supposed to be written but never really came together)

“Hey, wait a second – why don’t we just head for a BART station, go down, and walk through the tunnels over to Oakland? It’s got to be safer than staying above ground here, doesn’t it?”

Peter glares at him. “Really, genius? You want to go down into the underwater tunnels that were sealed on the floor of the Bay – not buried, not tunneled through solid rock, just dropped on the muddy bottom a hundred and thirty-five feet below sea level and packed into place with sand and gravel -- and just casually stroll four miles in a confined steel and concrete tube over to the other side?” He knows he must be giving off the world’s biggest case of stink-eye at the moment, but the idea is so idiotic he just doesn’t give a damn. “I don’t know about you, but I for one like not drowning if that, that thing casually happens to step on one of the tunnel segments.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Terry has the good graces to at least look embarrassed. “How’d you know all that?”

“I read these things called books. You should try it sometime. It’s fun.” Peter frowns, then squints up at the broken skyline. “What I wouldn’t give to be living in Boston right now. At least they’ve got a decent mass-transit system.”

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I still like this fic idea, but the scope of the plot was blooming to be enormously larger than I knew how to handle or had time for when I first thought of it. I might venture back to it at some point, maybe.


	3. Wednesday's Child

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki falls from the Bifrost, into Storybrooke. The nature of the curse can change the thoughts of anyone, even a would-be king... and his lost magic may be his only way out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this before consciously realizing that Sebastian Stan was both Bucky and the Mad Hatter, and started it up around the time I first saw that the Hatter's hat could access a dimensional nexus. From there, well, it seemed like a reasonable bridge between the events at the end of Thor and how exactly Loki could turn up in that movie's stinger and in The Avengers.

  
_Monday’s child is fair of face,_

_Tuesday’s child is full of grace,_

_Wednesday’s child is full of woe,_

_Thursday’s child has far to go…_  


* * *

1.

falling

falling

falling

falling

falling

tumbling tearing torn from skies starlight fractured and shredded like skin blistered peeling wracked and convulsing muscles locked rigid breaking bones and nails splintered gouging skin healing shaken and burning freezing dissolving losing loosing lost and lucid and

worlds

whirled

… words?

“…owe, how do you feel?”

There was a name, a word, a _syllable_ he missed, something in the cacophony of sounds and sensations, something that his mind couldn’t quite comprehend the pattern of. He blinks. Focuses. Looks. _Sees._ “I… sorry, what?”

The woman in the white coat smiles at him, encouragingly. “How do you feel today?”

He looks back at her, thoughts whirling, trying to recall _who where when why_ is this mortal questioning him, he who _was, should have been, might have been, never was_ king? He opens his mouth to demand explanations, feels the first word stumble over a tongue dry with disuse. His mind fills with images, sense-memories that feel like _his_ but yet _not,_ as though a cast of players once performed them on a stage strobe-lit by flashes –

\-- the Bifrost, broken, shards of rainbow fractured and tumbling against ebon-black skies all a-glitter with the light of a thousand thousand stars –

\-- the shimmering surface beneath his boots shuddering, like rotten ice over a lake of pitch-black water, as blows from Mjolnir crack and resound against it –

\-- twins, dozens, scores of himself, all of them laughing, manic glee coursing through him and _them_ and him as _they_ raise Gungnir, razor-edges poised to impale Thor where he lies, even as the lightning shatters them all asunder –

\-- electricity caught convulsing in branches of ice, the thrum of the observatory’s apparatus and _seidr_ -forged capacitors cycling ever-higher –

\-- the sting of the IV in the crook of his arm, the half-remembered voice of the anesthesiologist, _alright, I want you to start counting backwards from one hundred,_ the feel of his eyelids growing heavier and heavier as numbers spill from his slackening lips –

\-- the distant sense of paddles caressing his temples, soft and gentle like a dreamt-of lover, the whistling tone and high whine of capacitors discharging, the hot shiver of current burning through muscles and skin and bones and blood –

\-- limbs locked trembling, muscles gone rigid, fingers and toes twitching and curling in the grips of seizure as the aftermath of the pulsed electricity passes through him—

\-- both are _neither is_ **both are** _only one is_ –

\-- true?

The nurse ( _chirurgeon, shaman, witch, mind-mender_ , his thoughts whisper now), still stares at him, more concerned now than curious. Her pen taps impatiently against the hand-placard she holds. _Respond. Say something, anything, deflect her interest_ –

“I beg your pardon. I was lost in thought for the briefest of moments,” he manages, summoning the ghost of a smile.

“That’s alright,” she replies, seeming pleased at his words. “Some confusion is to be expected in the aftermath of the therapy you’ve been undergoing.”

( _flash:_ sullen grey skies and second-growth forests and primitive roads bound in tar and rock and dirt, clamorous iron carriages rattling about spewing acrid fumes and stinking of burnt rubber, lanterns that gleam bright beneath the twilight sky and drown out the stars again and again, day and night and day and night and day and night and somehow _never ever changing_ )

“… that, yes.” He rubs his temple with two fingers, half-recalling the quivering _hum_ of current, and meets her gaze with easily-feigned innocence. He leans forward and lets his other hand rest casually between his knees, fingers contorting in subtle intricate patterns to summon magicks learned long ago. “Remind me, how far along have we come?”

Fingers contorting –

\-- he fumbles for the edges of his magicks –

\-- where has it gone? –

\-- like worn gossamer tearing beneath his touch, shredded, disintegrating even as he tries to order it into coherency, bare scraps and threads gone ragged and raw –

\-- gently, _gently,_ mustn’t break it, can’t –

\-- start with one thread –

\-- start with –

\-- start –

\-- _there_ –

\-- a single thread, carefully held, then another, gently woven and knotted, together they can bear the weight of intent and –

\-- _snap_ –

\-- damn.

He shuts his eyes, feels the muscles of his jaw tense beneath his palm, and, fuming, almost misses her reply.

“Hmmm, let me see. Oh. That’s… odd.” She flips a page on her placard, frowning at what she sees. He forces a patient smile, raises an inquisitive eyebrow. “This can’t possibly be the right date for the start of your therapy.”

“Oh? And why is that?”

She looks up, flashing him an embarrassed smile as a flush rises in her cheeks. “Well, if this were correct, you’d have been doing this same cycle of treatment for over twenty years now.”

_Twenty years? That’s… not possible. Is it?_ He glances down at his hands, unlined by age or sickness. _No. It can’t be._ His stomach churns and his balance tips for a handful of heartbeats, a slow sideways roll that makes the ground beneath him seem to waver like the deck of a ship. 

(Images in his head: _bright sun in childhood, **(always in his brother’s shadow),** father always **never** smiling at his accomplishments, teacher’s pride through high school **(the disdain of his peers chafing like the scrapes and straps of ill-fitted armor),** feelings of **(no)** worth glowing **(simmering)** inside, **(despite the taunts and mockery of all who failed at)** recognizing that knowledge was power **(truer than any fool’s simple brawn),** and satisfaction **(resentment)** contentment **(loneliness)** confidence **(envy)** love_ \--)

He bares his teeth, friendly, companionable, hiding tumbling emotions behind a ready smile _(like he **always** often **never** has before)._ “You’re right, I can’t imagine it’s been anywhere near that long.”

The nurse rises, smiles nervously at something she sees in his expression. She brushes back strands of honeyed hair just barely beginning to show darker roots, lifts the placard against her chest (and part of him immediately notes: _gesture, defensive, subconscious, to my advantage_ ). “I’ll just… let me… I’m going to go speak with records and straighten this out.”

“That sounds very wise, Nurse… ” He catches a bare glimpse of the nametag pinned to the her coat, just above where the blazon upon her breast reads _Storybrooke Hospital_. “Pilár. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Lowe.”

\-- _that_ was what he had missed. A name. _His_ … name?

Lowe.

Yes, of course it is. It immediately feels _right_ in his mind, like an old, familiar glove, fitting like a second skin. His name, the one he’s been called by all his life, by everyone here in Storybrooke.

Lowell Keith Wednesday.

* * *

_“Loki, what is this madness?”_

_“Is it madness?” he hisses scornfully. “Is it? IS IT?!?”_


	4. And His Boots Full of Rocks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kids are people too, no matter how some grownups’d like to pretend they’re not , and it turns out there are people who are bullies no matter what age they are. And Pell, like his mom, like Captain America in the Timely Comics and Atlas Comics that he loves to read, has never liked bullies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one started mostly because of Robert Redford's presence in both The Winter Soldier and in Sneakers. It was supposed to be a transposition of the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. cast into the plot of sneakers, kinda, but it never went beyond me trying to write the background of how Phil Coulson, his single mom, and how he didn't turn into a government agent. This particular little ficlet was meant to show him finding an old Swiss army knife that his mother had bought and meant to give to his father as a good-luck gift, before his father got on a plane and never came back. (At least, that's the way his mom tells it.)

You wouldn’t think that it’s a bad thing to be the son of a dead war hero, but it really, _really_ feels like it is sometimes. Or at least, that’s what Pell thinks. 

Maybe it’s because Mom won’t tell him who Dad was, just talks about how he was strong and brave and she’d known him since he hadn’t been, and that he died in a plane crash in the War saving the lives of a lot of people. 

(Nobody else where they live can tell him more, either, because Mom was born in London. He can’t find anybody, even all the way over in the next borough, who can tell him any different about his Dad either. Pell’s not sure if that means Dad was a crewman on an American B-17, or a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne, or that maybe he was a British fighter pilot in the RAF.)

Maybe it’s because it feels like every other boy on the block has a dad, for one thing, or at least a parent who’s home most of the time. Mom’s got a job that keeps her busy, and she has to go on business trips a lot. And even though school takes up a lot of the day, and most often Mom’s home in the evening, and though she can usually sweet-talk Mrs. Burzinski down in 2C to keep an eye on him when she won’t be, well… there are times growing up Pell feels abandoned.

(Pell has uncles that visit, though he’s pretty sure they aren’t his Dad’s brothers, at least not like _family_ brothers, and they definitely aren’t _Mom’s_ brothers. Sure, it’s fun to have the occasional visit from Uncle Timothy, who takes him over to Coney Island and instructs him on the finer points of how to use a gun at the amusement park shooting galleries. And then there’s Uncle Howard, who buys him comic books and sometimes takes him out on his yacht to see the Statue of Liberty as the sun is setting out towards the western edge of the Hudson. Plus there’s Mister Jones and Mister Morita, too, who Mom and his uncles say are some of Dad’s old friends from the War. Mister Jones, when he visits, teaches him the basics and grammar (as well as a handful of really useful dirty words) of French and German, and Mister Morita shows him how to rewire the insides of a radio with practically nothing. Both of them coach him on how, and more importantly _when,_ to wrestle and fight, even though Mister Morita calls it “judo” and “karate”. 

So yes, sure, it’s almost always good to have them visit, even if sometimes the neighbors give them queer looks, but it’s not like having a dad, not really. Especially since Pell can’t get any of them to tell him anything more definite about his Dad, either; just a couple of vague stories about factories and tanks and energy rifles and hidden mountain bases that he doesn’t want to tell the other kids on the block for what he figures are perfectly reasonable reasons. He can’t back up the stories his uncles and his Dad’s old friends tell him with anything concrete, after all, and who else is going to believe stories that sound like something out of a comic book if he’s got no evidence?)

And OK, maybe part of it’s because Mom and Dad weren’t exactly _married,_ too, but Pell keeps that little detail very close to his chest once he learns it. He saw how more than a few grownups treated Ruby Mueller after her high school sweetheart went to Korea and died in the Battle of Triangle Hill and it turned out she was, as they say, “in the family way”.

People, no matter how old they are, can be unfair sometimes. Pell still remembers how Mom got kind of emotional about that. She’d sat in the chair by the window, looking through a box of old papers and photographs, fingertip tracing round and round the rim of a cup of tea until it was cold all through. Pell thinks maybe Mom was remembering how people were to her when Dad died, like maybe they were unkind, bullies even, though he’s hard pressed to imagine his Mom not telling any bully where to get off.

Kids are people too, no matter how some grownups’d like to pretend they’re not , and it turns out there are people who are bullies no matter what age they are. And Pell, like his mom, like Captain America in the Timely Comics and Atlas Comics that he loves to read, has never liked bullies.

It’s 1954, spring, Republican Dwight Eisenhower was sworn in as the 34th President of the United States a little more than a year ago, and Pelagius Carter just turned eight years old.


End file.
